Vlogcanic

I bought the ENPWI-G2 WiFi Cardbus adapter knowing full well that it’s Realtek RTL8185 chipset is not the most Linux friendly piece of hardware in the world. The thing is the card is really cheap (about $15) and the chipset is also present in a bunch of other cheap cards so I wanted to see actually how hard it was going to be to get it up and running just because the whole Linux and WiFi thing kind of gets my attention.

To my suprise, having it fully funcional in Puppy Linux 3.0 was so straightforward that I’m not so sure it merits a write-up, but just in case, here it is.

So you grab your Puppy Linux 3.00 LiveCD and use it to boot up your computer with the ENPWI-G2 plugged into the Cardbus slot. You need to download the latest Windows drivers for the chipset (it wasn’t so straightforward as to just plug the thing in) from the Realtek web site. There are a few options, I used the ones dated 2007/7/26 –make sure you download the drivers for the RTL8185L chispet.

Once downloaded unpack them to your home directory, and use the ROX file manager to navigate into the WINXP folder. There already? Open up a terminal session in the WINXP directory (right click on the file manager’s window, then click on Window and Terminal Here).

In the terminal, install the Windows XP driver to NDISWrapper by typing

ndiswrapper -i net8185.inf

and then insert ndiswrapper into the kernel

modprobe ndiswrapper

and that’s it! Your card should be working now (the lower LED will be blinking) so that you can now go to the RutilT wireless network gadget included in Puppy Linux 3.0 and set up your wireless network link.

Afterwards.

I found the card to work well enough with Puppy Linux 3.00. All the basic tricks get done (connection to open access points and WEP) quickly so I thought that having it work in my Ubuntu Edgy would be just as simple. Boy, I was wrong!. More on that later.